Joi Ito: Creative commons

19 Nov Joi Ito: Creative commons

Joichi Ito: People are just beginning to understand that in marketing you need the users By Doris Obermair Go to Joichi Ito’s LinkedIn account and you will get a slight idea of how busy this man must be: a board member of over 20 of some of the most interesting and influential online enterprises and Internet non-profit organizations, a business angle provider and venture capital investor to many of them, a senior researcher at Keio University and an undisputed authority as commentator and conference speaker on the present and the future of the Internet. For this interview, we are with Joi Ito, the board members of Creative Commons, who is also Creative Commons’ CEO in Japan. Founded in 2001 by Stanford Law professor Laurence Lessing, Creative Commons has become the most important digital legal framework by providing creators and copyright holders with a legal option to release and distribute on the web using Creative Commons licenses and granting the public some or all rights to use, share or mix the licensed content. What effect has the digital sharing culture and the phenomenon of amateur creation on Intellectual Property Right (IPR) and copyright laws? One of the effects of this revolution is that it has broken some of the original notions of how intellectual property should be treated. In addition to the impact that the Internet has had on e-Commerce or online publishing, there is a whole other layer of content that will be unleashed once we get over the sort of legal friction that’s occurring right now. As a society, we haven’t really thought much about the value and impact of sharing in a positive sense to the culture and economy. The call for stricter copyright protection by the traditional content industries has turned companies against their own users and customers who live in a digital culture of sharing and co-creation. What’s the way out of this war on users? There are different ways to look at it. One, we can focus on the problems that the sharing culture causes. But the problem with focusing on problems is that when we try to solve them, things usually just go back to normal. So, on the one hand you can say, Internet and digital technologies make it easy for people to pirate, and that is destroying the content creating industry which is a “problem”. But on the other hand, we have things like Wikipedia or Linux, which have used online activism and collective action in a positive way. Just recently, I was talking to a UN delegate who was saying that the “Personal Landmine Treaty” would not have happened without the Internet. So, the cultural and the social parts of society have started to emphasize the benefits of it. But at the same time, we are running into this kind of protection that is put in place for the “professional” content. I think we need to get out of this war of “All information wants to be free” vs. “All-Rights-Reserved” to a slightly more contemporary version which would include a whole spectrum of rights. We can separate them legally, we can separate them technically, and we can link them together in an interesting way. When we first started the web, we thought that there would be this huge revolution and democratization of media, but it turned out that everybody created portals. It was not until we had Google, blogs and other interactive tools that we were actually able get the voice of the people; it took 10 years longer than we had expected. Similarly, the optimists and visionaries have been talking about the global mind and global consciousness and how the web will connect everything together. But every time we get one piece, we realize that there is another piece that we don’t have. Look at science and the problems researchers are facing: there are many databases that are free, but they don’t work with each other because of little technical details and legal licenses or because of the semantics. Many teachers are now publishing their courseware under an open license, but because of a slight technological incompatibility of the license, it is not connected. So the point is, even if there are groups of people who logically want to work with each other, it doesn’t always work. If you are an academic and you publish a paper into a database, your peer in Africa won’t be able to read it. A lot of the commercial content people think that the people at Creative Commons or iCommons are anti-copyright. We are not anti-copyright, we are just pro-choice! So I think that what has happened is that each side has created an image of the other side which is sometimes antagonistic: a lot of Internet people think that all professionals and mainstream media people are evil, which is also not true; there are a lot of great media companies right now working with user generated content. So, I think it is a really important time for us to sit down and talk about very practical things because there are a lot of solutions that could be created that haven't been considered yet. On the one hand, companies embrace the collaborative, content-creating user, but on the other hand, they can’t cope with losing control over their products. Part of the problem is generational. The heads of the big media companies are still in many cases people who don’t use the Internet. I think that many people are just beginning to understand that in marketing you need the users, and they don’t realise that it’s a package. You can’t be half-opened and half-closed. For example, when the band Nine Inch Nails released their album “Ghost”, they gave away their music under a Creative Commons licence and they made 1,600,000 USD in one week. It was a huge success because they did it all the way! I think if you do it halfway, users are smart and they will realize that it is not true and open. For me, it is a matter of creating some success stories and also a matter of literacy in these companies because they are too used to having control. You can’t have control. There is so much benefit that they still haven’t been able to measure yet, and I think they can by experimenting and learning about it. The Creative Commons is actually one of these great success stories. Tell us about the last statistics on the use of Creative Commons (CC). We are estimating that we have about 130 million works licensed under one of different Creative Commons license. Two very important things have happened recently: the rights collecting agencies (RCA) have been negative about CC because we add a level of complexity to their business model, but the Danish and the Dutch RCAs have now started to allow their artists to use a CC license. So for non-commercial use it is CC and for commercial use it is the RCA collecting. So some of the people who used to be our biggest critics are starting to use our licenses, and even though it is a small percentage of their works, it is a big step for us! Also, the tool makers have changed their views. For example, Microsoft, a company that has not always been the very open, now has a CC plug-in for the Office Suite. Oracle and Google are using it too. Is there any difference in the acceptance of CC in terms of countries? At this point our movement is still small, so a lot of it depends on the activism in certain countries. Some countries are naturally open to it, for instance, China agrees with how CCs work. Brazil is also very strong because it is really about promoting its culture through sharing, which has a lot to do with the support of Cultural Minister Gilberto Gil. To me, it is also very interesting to look at countries like India, which has a very different interpretation of the value of CC. Some of the most famous Indian movie directors see piracy as an important way of promoting film making, so they have a very different outlook on sharing from somebody who is brought up in Hollywood. As we become a global economy, all these different people have to work together, and one of the things other than the legal part of CC which I think is very important is the social normative part. This involves expressing how you would like your work to be used and allows other artists to understand and accept that. So it is a kind of literacy of expressing how you would like your work to be perceived. It also allows artists to decide if they would permit derivative works or commercial use, and other artists should just respect their decision. But it is often hard to tell when what the artist wanted when it says “go ahead and use it” on the internet, and this creates a kind of literacy problem. Do you think we might see Creative Commons licensing for scientific patents anytime soon? Creative Commons itself does not work with patents. There are other good organizations that work with patents, but in the field of copyright we are doing a lot in science and education. Much of our support comes from government agencies and foundations which have funded research only to find out that the solution is in four different labs that can’t work together because of their copyright. Many of the founders of these projects have created a network of people who say they are open, but they are incompatible. Now, we are going in to search for the data and connect it, while also making a legal framework for compatibility of the license. This does remind me of when the Internet first started: we had this dream of how everything would be connected, but it wasn’t until we got the web and these other things that it has actually worked. Similarly, the idea of sharing and openness in research has been around for a while, and it has been technically possible, but the transaction costs have been too high. So we are trying to make it actually financially feasible, and we have been getting support and funding from organizations to do it, so this is one of our most important initiatives right now. Can too strict IPR and copyright enforcement get into the way of innovation? And if so, how can you prove that sharing unleashes collective creativity and eventually stimulates innovation? There are 2 steps that we need to do, one is that we need to prove the sharing economy. We need to prove that sharing is better than not sharing and we can do that in small areas, even within the current copyright law. The first step is to prove the theory that amateurs can contribute to society and that if you share and do it properly and legally, it increases the value of society. At the same time, there is still a role for these professional players; they just have to do things differently. If you look at the copyright law generally, a lot of it is influenced by what happens in the US. The US legal system is based on this common law; it’s a practice, right. So for instance, take sampling [music]. It used to be allowed under “fair use”, so you could sample other people’s music. But soon, the norm in the music industry became that even sampling one note was illegal, then people started paying, and suddenly the law in the US changed. Consequently, a lot of countries started to copy that change, like Japan and other places. So I think it is interesting how practise affects laws in America which then causes America to pressure other countries to change their laws. So as a second step, it is importance to prove practice as well, and I think that by using Creative Commons licenses we can change these incumbent practices. Related Links: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/ http://creativecommons.org/